Liberation

February 1945. Planes roaring overhead; people dancing; men strutting drunkenly down the unpaved street, laughing, singing and shouting,”The Russians are here! The Russians are here!”

My uncle is one of these men—as usual, the center of any celebration. He is the one who found shelter on a farm in a small village southeast of Warsaw for himself, my mother and me after we were bombed.

I am five years old. Confused, I am not sure what it is all about. The roaring of the planes, the loud laughter of the drunken men stumbling down the road, the women crying and laughing. It is all bewildering.

Summer 1947. I have a completely new identity. We are political refugees in Belgium. I am told that I am not Catholic but Jewish. That “uncle” is really my biological father. The Polish soldier/father whose return I have been anticipating and for whom I have been yearning does not exist.

The following years bring additional instability—changing schools, learning new languages, moving to Germany, the country of the enemy. Nevertheless, the Americans are there, it is safe, and anybody can work. I long to get out, to breathe freely. I am still in captivity.

Winter 1959. I marry an American army chaplain, am embraced into the American military community, and come to the United States—a dream fulfilled.

A glorious day in 1969. I become an American citizen. Now I am truly liberated.

Felicia Lederberger-Bialecki-Graber, Biography

Felicia Lederberger-Bialecki-Graber, born in Tarnow, Poland, in March 1940, survived the war with her mother on false Aryan identity papers, and her father survived in hiding. After the war, Felicia, her one-year-old brother, and her parents moved first to Brussels, Belgium, then to Frankfurt, Germany. She attended schools in Poland, Belgium, Germany, and England, where she received her General Certificate of Education from Oxford University. In 1959 she met her future husband, Chaplain First Lieutenant Howard Graber, who was stationed in Frankfurt.

She attended the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, North Carolina State University, and the University of Pittsburgh, where she received her B.A. She received her Master of Arts in Teaching from Duquesne University. From 1973 until her retirement in 1996, Felicia taught German at Latimer Junior High in Pittsburgh and French and German at Parkway Junior and Senior High in St Louis County. Felicia also taught the course Literature of the Holocaust at the Central Hebrew High School and at the Adult Jewish Institute in St Louis and conducted workshops in foreign language methodology for Parkway and CAJE teachers

Since 1998, she has been a docent and a speaker at the St Louis Holocaust Museum and Learning Center. She served on the Holocaust Commission and the Holocaust Docent Advisory Committee and speaks and lectures about the Holocaust in area colleges, schools and community agencies.

Felicia is the founder of the Hidden Child/Child Survivor Group of St Louis and the co-founder of the St Louis Descendants of the Holocaust, a group of children and grandchildren of Holocaust victims. She is a member of the Memory Project at the HMLC in St. Louis (an ongoing writing program for Holocaust survivors which was founded at the USHMM in Washington). Her writings have been published in the Sagarin Review, The First Harvest, and The New Harvest, as well as in various magazines and newsletters nationwide. She is also contributed to the child-survivor anthology, And Life is Changed Forever, published by Wayne University Press in the spring of 2006.

Felicia Graber lived in St. Louis with her husband Rabbi Howard M. Graber; in December 2012 they moved to Baltimore MD. They have two children, eight grandchildren and two great-grandchildren..